Joseph Mathia Svoboda was born in Baghdad, Iraq to a prominent family of Central European descent in 1840. During the period of his employment with the Lynch Brothers' Tigris and Euphrates Steam Navigation Company in 1862 he began to keep daily diaries, which chronicle in great detail, not just his personal life - living in the Christian quarter of the city - but also the daily life of a steam ship clerk, including the noting of daily weather patterns, river conditions, ship traffic, cargo logs, archeological digs, tribal conflicts, and troop movements up and down the Euphrates between Baghdad and Basrah. The diaries continued until his death in 1908 over a period of 46 years, overlapping the Tanzimat, and Abdülhamid II’s rule. However, one of the richest elements of his journal is the careful log of people, whether passengers, or friends and family. He came into contact with an extraordinarily diverse number of people, from Sheiks and diplomats, Turkish Zaptiye, and Jewish, Christian and Muslim residents. Not to mention his own extended familial network stretching from India, through Iran into Europe. This paper merges traditional historiography with emerging applications of digital humanities to analyze maps and visualization created by the author - by drawing heavily on the data from his journals, and letters sent back and forth amongst his social and kinship networks - in order to reimagine the experience of empire and the Ottoman-Persian borderland by the individual residents in this remote province of the Turkish Empire. In a period when the Ottoman empire was acutely focused on completely transforming the relationship between the empire and its people, and within and among the classes present in its population, the patterns of social networks explored by this paper offer insight into both the cause and consequence of different social and kinship groups on the empire's slow transition to state. Mapping these interactions help explain the effect of social power on political power in a region so far removed from the Ottoman Capital.